Tomboy

Tomboy describes a girl — or, less often, an adult woman — whose dress, play, interests and manner run to what a given society codes as masculine. It is the oldest word in this part of the vertical by several centuries, and the most common: for most of the people it has been applied to, it named a phase of childhood rather than a permanent identity.

Two things distinguish it from the other expression terms here. It is applied to children, mostly by adults, before the child has any say in the matter; and it is not, in most usage, an LGBTQ+ term at all. Tomboyism does not predict adult sexual orientation and does not indicate a transgender identity, though a minority of the people described by it turn out to be one, the other or both.

Definition & scope

The content of the word is entirely relative to the society applying it. What counts as tomboyish — trousers, team sport, rough play, a preference for boys as playmates — is a list of things a particular culture has assigned to boys, and the word changes as the list does. That makes tomboy a clean example of gender expression: it describes the distance between a child's behaviour and a local expectation, and says nothing about who that child is.

The label sits alongside butch and gender nonconformity but is not a synonym for either. Butch is an adult self-description within lesbian and queer women's communities; tomboy is usually applied from outside and usually to a child. The nearest masculine-side counterpart is the modern coinage femboy, and the difference in their receptions — tomboy affectionate and long-established, femboy contested and new — is one of the sharper asymmetries in this vocabulary.

History & origins

• 1530s–1550s: tomboy is first recorded, meaning a rude or boisterous boy. Dictionaries differ on the first attestation, with the Oxford Dictionary of English giving 1533 and Etymonline the 1550s.
• 1570s: the sense shifts to a bold or immodest woman — for a period the word was an insult about sexual forwardness, not about play.
• 1590s–1600s: the modern sense settles: a wild, romping girl who behaves like a spirited boy.
• Late nineteenth century: American health reformers reverse the valuation, arguing that vigorous outdoor girlhood produces healthier women; surveys of the period record Charlotte Perkins Gilman praising tomboyism's benefits in Women and Economics (1898) and the playground advocate Joseph Lee describing a tomboy phase in 1915 as necessary to girls' development.
• 1977: the first serious prevalence measurement is published, and finds the behaviour to be a majority experience rather than a deviation.
• 2002: the Tomboy Project begins recruiting and studying tomboys directly rather than inferring them from adult recollection.

In practice

Because the label is applied by others, its practical significance is mostly about tolerance. Tomboyism has historically been permitted — indulged, even — in a way that feminine behaviour in boys has not, and that asymmetry is consistent across the research: the same society that finds a girl in a football kit charming finds a boy in a dress alarming. The permission is also time-limited. It is conventionally withdrawn at adolescence, when the girl is expected to stop, and much of the qualitative literature on tomboyhood is about that withdrawal rather than about the behaviour itself.

Psychology

Tomboyism is not a disorder and has never been one. The ICD-11 removed gender incongruence from its mental-disorders chapter in 2019, and ordinary childhood gender nonconformity has no diagnostic status of its own.

The empirical picture is straightforward. Bailey, Bechtold and Berenbaum's study in Archives of Sexual Behavior recruited 60 tomboys aged 4 to 9 and compared them with 15 sisters and 20 brothers on playmate preference, sex-typed activities and gender identity. On nearly every measure the tomboys were substantially more masculine than their sisters and generally less masculine than their brothers — that is, they occupied an intermediate position rather than crossing over. The paper's framing throughout is the one its opening sentence states: tomboys are girls who behave like boys, which makes the label a fact about interests, playmates and activities rather than a claim about being a boy.

Prevalence & culture

How common is being a tomboy?

Common enough that the research literature has repeatedly had to argue against treating it as rare.

The foundational measurement is Hyde, Rosenberg and Behrman's 1977 study in Psychology of Women Quarterly. Prompted by an initial observation that 78% of a group of undergraduate women recalled having been tomboys, they found 63% of junior-high girls reporting themselves tomboys and 51% of adult women reporting having been one in childhood. Their conclusion was that tomboyism is statistically quite common with little indication of anything abnormal about it.

Later self-report data agrees on the shape. In the National LGBTQ+ Women's Community Survey, tomboy was the second most common past gender descriptor among the 2,048 respondents who elaborated, chosen by 30%, but only 14% used it currently — the clearest available demonstration that the word names a stage most people leave.

Because the term is applied overwhelmingly to girls and women, any population figure has to be halved on the way out, and the figure recorded on this entry does that explicitly.